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6sense launches tool designed to pinpoint B2B buyer intent

6sense, a predictive intelligence platform for B2B marketing and sales, introduced a new product called ProductSense, which is designed to reveal B2B buyers' intent to purchase specific products.

"ProductSense shows our customers which prospects are most likely to buy, what they will buy and when," Amanda Kahlow, CEO of 6sense, told FierceCMO. "Predicting buyers and the products they're interested in isn't magic—it's math. …And lots of behavioral, intent-related data. SiriusDecisions says that 60 to 90 percent of buyers make their decisions before they get into your marketing automation system, so we're helping you find that 60 to 90 percent. We're using unidentified behavioral data, the anonymous behavioral data, to find those people and those companies before it's too late, before they've already made their decision."

Kahlow said the tool works by combining both static data and activity data to predict what products prospects or customers are getting ready to buy. So that means ProductSense takes activity data from, for example, publisher sites, blogs, communities forums, and business directories, and merges it with activity from their client's internal digital channels, for example, call centers, Web and social, to determine customer intent.

"We like to say we're creating structure out of unstructured," Kahlow said. "The world of behavioral data and the world of digital is a very unstructured world, and trying to create indicators, features, if you will, that the math team and our data science team can use to predict is incredibly difficult. We're using this concept of what we call intense behavioral data to help us sniff out that a company actually has a need right now."

While the product can be deployed in an automated fashion, the company works with individual clients to tailor the product to their needs.

"We're creating all of these new indicators for each of our customers based on their product lines, to feed our mathematical engine to determine whether or not that should go in as a predictive signal of the product," Kahlow said. "They tell us what their products are, they tell us the keywords related to those products, but then we go and find other words that they didn't sniff out, that they may not know. So, our math will help find other signals that may not be intuitive to them, and other activities that they might not think are related to their purchasing for their customers, which can be really insightful as well from an analytics perspective."

ProductSense can also be used to forecast business by uncovering immediate and future demand for particular products, Kahlow said.

"We have customers right now that are using this for forecasting—marketing as influencing not only sales, but marketing as influencing operations of that business. We can use all this data to help marketers be better, smarter marketers, we can help sales to grow the business, and we can also help to determine the direction of the business."